


conditions best suited of all to unreserve

by filia_noctis, toujours_nigel



Series: Conditions Best Suited [9]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-04 06:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1768987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/pseuds/filia_noctis, https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>People, there is now really stunning art of this fic. Go look upon it and squee. http://fbrri.tumblr.com/post/128226749214/februeruri-lanyon-says-oh-hell-with-it</p>
        </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Andrew wakes up to the persistent knowledge that there’s someone in the house except him and Laurie. He lies in the dark, staring up and straining his ears hoping that it’s only his unfamiliarity with the peculiar creaks of this house settling itself for the night.

For a long moment, the only sounds are that of Laurie breathing heavily into the crook of his shoulder, the susurration of the sheets as his leg shifts against the cloth. By now he is beginning to know the signs of Laurie trapped in a nightmare of Dunkirk, trapped and fighting to move, weighed down by a leg that no longer responds flawlessly to commands. He sets a hand to the nape of his neck and pushes down, ruthlessly forcing Laurie face-first into the pillow. His breathing evens out and the leg stops moving. Every time he does this, Andrew is left horribly certain that he’s forcing Laurie to his death within the dream, but it’s the only way to quieten him. He kisses Laurie’s hair in apology, the top of his shoulder, the clenched knuckles of his fist wrapped around the edge of the pillow.

There’s a sound again, slightly louder this time, as of someone easing a door shut, and then, unmistakably there are footsteps loud in the quietness of the night. Laurie doesn’t stir. Andrew slips out of the bed and pads to the door, the floor cold against his bare feet. Light seeps into the bedroom beneath the door and there are other sounds now: a chair being dragged out, shoes being kicked off, a body settling heavily into the chair. He can remember few doors he has been so reluctant to open.

In the soft light he looks like a child. Ralph Lanyon, sitting at Laurie’s Aunt Olive’s breakfast nook with his head pillowed on his arms.

Andrew closes the door behind him, and steps into the room. Lanyon looks up at him, and blinks a little blearily. Tight, Andrew thinks with a species of despair. Sozzled.

“I daresay you weren’t expecting to find me here,” he offers, and pulls out the other chair.

Lanyon pulls himself upright with what looks a fair bit of reluctance. “I ought to have. Don’t cast yourself in a pit of misery, dear boy. Worse things happen rather frequently.”

Andrew feels young and abashed. Lanyon is still in his travel-stained uniform and here’s Andrew making heavy weather of something that must seem to him very trivial. “I can make up the bed,” he offers. “We hadn’t... that is, Laurie hadn’t expected you.”

“Bed would be prime,” Lanyon assures him, and finds a smile from somewhere that looks entirely unreal and rather as though it was issued as part of his naval kit. “But a drink would be favourite.”

Andrew hesitates for a moment over offering an inebriated man more drink, but is rescued by ignorance. “We haven’t any,” he says. “That is, I’m sure there’s some about the place, but we didn’t bring any and I’m not sure where it is. We only got here yesterday, and neither of us drinks.”

Lanyon looks at him very steadily till he feels rather inexplicably shy. “Laurie used to, but I see things change.”

“I could make you tea.” There’s not enough sugar, probably, but there’s a trick to it that Dave taught him.

“No,” Lanyon says, pressing his lips together like he’s trying not to laugh. “But thank you. You weren’t expecting me; we’ve come in for a refitting.”

They sit in deepening silence for some minutes while Andrew racks his brain for something to say or give that will get him away from this man. To offer to wake Laurie will look like purest cowardice.

At length Lanyon asks, “Are the pipes noisy?”

Well, that makes sense, and will get them safely out of each other’s presence for a while. No hope of going back to bed, but he can slip in and wake Laurie and tell him about their visitor. Their quiet week’s all in ashes, but Andrew has never been able to sustain an illusion long enough to get himself into trouble over it. He usually gets in trouble for the other thing. He says, “Quieter than you’d expect. I can lend you something, if you’ll wear mufti.”

Lanyon smiles his naval kit smile again. “I doubt you’ve anything that’d fit me. I should have something tolerable with me. I’ve stowed the bag in the other bedroom, hope that’s no trouble.”

Andrew wouldn’t tell him if it were. “We haven’t been using it,” he says instead, and wonders whether the little jolt of pleasure he gets from it is terrible.

Lanyon says, very coolly, “I noticed,” and levers himself up from his chair. It takes him something of the same effort sitting up at Andrew’s arrival had done. Not drunk, Andrew revises rapidly. Not drunk at all, just exhausted to the point of inebriation. Such a _bloody_ mess.

He forestalls Lanyon and slips in to run the bath himself, and stands in the growingly humid room watching it fill. The bathroom is strangely out of scale, with a functional lavatory tucked in alongside the vast claw-footed bathtub and jostling for space with the wide counter surrounding and cracked old mirror overtopping the washbasin. The whole house is the same way, like a Victorian mansion shrunk down and erratically modernised. It must have been hell to fill that tub.

Lanyon comes in presently and moves around Andrew easily, setting clothes on the shelf and a shaving kit on the counter. Andrew hasn’t noticed a beard. Lanyon ducks out once and returns divested of the uniform jacket and tie. In his shirt-sleeves it is easier to see that he is quite young and utterly exhausted: in the mirror and partially out of uniform he looks haggard. Andrew shuts off the taps and moves decidedly towards the door, already rehearsing the way in which he can convey the information to Laurie with minimum fuss. It doesn’t sound remotely possible even in his own head.

Lanyon unstraps his watch and clicks it down on the counter and says without turning to look at him, “Fetch some cigarettes, would you? Mine have given up the ghost.”

Cigarettes, unlike booze, are ready to hand: Laurie smokes rather a lot, and Andrew has found that he likes it more than he thought likely. There’s an open pack sitting on the bedside table, but Andrew forgoes that in favour of rooting through his coat, hung up neatly in the hall closet. No sense in waking Laurie and then disappearing. When he ducks back into the bathroom Lanyon is already submerged in the water and there is a neat pile of discarded clothing on the stool under the counter. He gestures with the cigarettes but Lanyon doesn’t turn to look at him: his head is tipped back and his eyes are closed; in the damp coolness his hair has fallen out of its neatness and strands of it are sticking damply to his face. Andrew retreats in good order and makes enough noise coming back in to wake him.

“Do me a kindness and watch that I don’t drown,” Lanyon says. He smiles a little, distantly and not really at Andrew. “Terrible way to go.”

Andrew wants to say that he can imagine, but the trouble is he’s sure Lanyon doesn’t have to. He moves the clothes from the stool onto the counter and appropriates it. The humidity makes his pyjama shirt stick to his back and under the arms and in their bedroom he’s sure Laurie has woken and is wondering where he’s got to. Having woken once, Lanyon is clearly not about to fall asleep and slip under, but it isn’t the sort of request one denies. Andrew fixes his eyes on the floor and sits quietly. The sound of their breathing and the splashes of water fill the air to the brim.

Lanyon says, “Light me a cigarette. Thanks.”

Their hands touch when he takes it, wet fingers slipping against Andrew’s. Andrew tells himself, very sternly, that he’s being an idiot, and looks Lanyon over with a critical eye: tired, of course, but well enough under it; skin drawn with exhaustion and shoulders mottled with bruises, but no bandages, no stitches that he can see, no evidence of hurt or harm. Lanyon looks battered, but it would be difficult in the autumn of ’41 to find someone in the pink of health.

“I know this is dead boring for you, but you’ve no idea what heaven it is not to bathe in salt water. Many thanks.”

“I was in hospital,” Andrew counters, “this is nothing.”

“Yes, Laurie’s told me a little about that. Terrible conditions at that place, of course. I collect your people came in after the maids had left?”

Andrew nods. It is beyond silly to care about it, especially so long after, but the thought that Laurie had told Lanyon about their early days at the hospital so callously still stings. But of course it’s only true.

Lanyon draws hard on his cigarette, taps it lightly against the rim of the bathtub to shake the ash off, and says, “When I was about your age, I shipped to Bombay on the _Zuleika_. She was a bigger affair than I was used to; I’d gone on trawlers till then, going up to Iceland and similar. The old man had taken two separate contracts, so... well, I forget what we were shipping to India but we brought back absolute crates of spices, hold brimming over with this really rather overpowering smell. And while she was resupplying we had a week in Bombay Port. Hot as hell and wetter than a downpour, that’s Bombay in the monsoons. But very bright, and very strange. I loitered in the market squares and gawked a lot from what I remember; mostly people build up contacts all over the place but that takes time. Wandered into a political meeting once and was very nearly made an example of. Didn’t understand a bloody word, of course, and the constabulary had to rescue me from getting lynched. Got my ear talked right off afterwards.” Whatever reason he had started the story Lanyon’s clearly forgotten it. He takes a long drag on the cigarette and subsides into silence, frowning.

Andrew says, “I think it’s a damned shame what we’re doing there.”

“Railroads and vaccinations and electricity and democracy?” Lanyon grins mirthlessly. “Do you? Well, they’re getting their own back now, with the bloody Non-Cooperation. Look, I haven’t the energy for an argument about it now, but yes, past time we pulled out, one can still make a case for Africa but even that’s getting thin now. We can’t fight the Kraut because they’re invading sovereign nations and keep clinging to our territories.”

It’s strange how much this miniaturises talking to Lanyon: a thought Andrew agrees with married to one he despises. He nods a vague, noncommittal agreement and goes back to staring at the floor. The granite has webs of silver and green through it, gleaming wetly. It’s better than looking at Lanyon looking at him. This man, Andrew thinks, has been to bed with the man I love, and I met him tonight rising from the bed of the man he loves, and something there should be between us of anger or envy, more than this absolute blank.

“You’re at Brasenose with Laurie?”

“At Balliol, actually. But we see a fair bit of each other.”

“Laurie said you’re reading History. Do you like it? Sorry, unfair to Raynes. I found it all a bit of a bore at school, and of course I never went up myself.” He stubs out the cigarette and hunts about for a washcloth, discards two before alighting on one that he likes. “What’s it like?”

Oxford Andrew can speak about with enthusiasm and at length and often with uncharacteristic indifference for the real feelings of his listeners on the subject. A term there has done more to build him up than months driving an ambulance through London, and he feels it more strongly because Dave usually disagrees emphatically. The ambulance service satisfied him on a primitive level, but it had been a daily grind through the worst of war, and vindication had not led to joy. The only faults he can find with Oxford are its war wounds, and those he refuses to discuss with Lanyon. He talks in reparation of everything else, and winds up telling a long and involved story about punting and Parson’s Pleasure and scandalised mothers.

When he finishes, Lanyon is listening raptly, body twisted to face Andrew and head tipped against the rim of the tub. “You tell a good story,” he says, and Andrew finds himself going pink with pleasure. He doesn’t often get a chance to tell Oxford stories, as Laurie is most often with him when they occur, and Dave always looks pinched and haggard. Lanyon looks like a boy being told about unimaginable futures.

“What did you want to study?”

“Geography at the other shop.” Lanyon says it quite lightly and bends to scrub at his legs with the washcloth, presenting his back to Andrew. There are bruises on his shoulders, and the seamed line of an old scar, and the arc of his spine bends in the water and mingles with the shadows. Andrew wants him gone and wants him never to have met Laurie and wants to put him to bed and sit vigil over his sleep. It is a lie to say that you feel nothing when it is simply that you have no word to put to what you feel.

Very quietly, feeling his way by tone as a blind man might by touch, he says, “It must have been terrible.” He does not know whether he means expulsion or the Merchant Marines or losing his ship or losing his hand or returning to war. All of it, perhaps.

Lanyon twists to look at him, the torsion of his body sharp and wrecked in a way his expression is not allowed to be. “It’s hell while it lasts.” Perhaps Lanyon does not know what Andrew means any better than Andrew does himself.

With friends, Andrew is often bolder than anyone quite likes. He wouldn’t have thought, forty minutes ago, to count Lanyon among them. They have met before, but Laurie’s presence has functioned as a queer constraint, and Laurie has been there every time since the first. “But we always want it to last, don’t we?”

Lanyon doesn’t turn to look at him. After a moment he says, “Of course, my dear,” very lightly like he’s humouring a child, but there is a strain underneath the lightness that makes it sound brittle, desperate, as though it is as strange for Lanyon to be here as it is for Andrew. It is absurdly reassuring.

“I’ll make up the other bed,” he says. “I’ll take it myself.”

“Raynes, really, have some sense. Imagine waking to a different lover than you went to bed with.” Lanyon tips his head back to offer him a grin that is closer to a baring of teeth than a smile. “He’d assume I’d murdered you, or at the very least knocked you upside the head and stowed the body somewhere.

“I was planning on waking Laurie to tell him,” Andrew replies. What sort of quixotic fool Lanyon must take him for.

“Don’t put yourself out. I’ll take the bed in the spare room. I’ll sleep till noon if not later; it’ll disrupt your day.” He sits upright for a second, and bends to scrub furiously at his feet. “Have you seen the Abbey yet?”

“We meant to go today, but Laurie had a bit of an injury in the morning; smashed his leg against the sofa.”

Lanyon’s shoulders pull inwards in a wince, and a shiver delineated in soap suds travels the length of his spine and ripples the water. “Try in a day or so, it’s a bit of a walk.”

“You’ve been here before.”

“Yes. Alec, he’s a friend of mine, was at Oxford, so we came down together once. We ended up walking entirely unreasonable distances, so mine is the voice of experience.”

“I hear and obey,” Andrew says, intending only flippancy, but Lanyon turns completely in the tub, ending with his elbows resting on the rim, looking quite keenly at Andrew.

“Do you? Wouldn’t have thought it. Thought your people didn’t go in for that sort of thing.”

As anti-conchie rhetoric goes, it is unspeakably mild, and Lanyon is looking at him without open hostility. “Most of my people have been soldiers,” Andrew says, and adds conscientiously, “my father’s people, I mean. I don’t know much about my mother’s family.”

“Lucky man,” Lanyon murmurs, and shakes his head, sending a spray of water clean across the room to spatter against the door. Andrew, much closer, gets a line of wetness across his knees. “Terribly sorry. My father was a doctor, first man in our family to have gone up. Last too, come to that. My grandfather didn’t have much use for education himself, very much the type of the prosperous farmer.”

“No sailors?” Lanyon himself seems so very much a realisation of the type that this is mildly disturbing. But there’s him, of course, and his father’s family.

“Lord, no. Or there might have been a disgraced uncle or runaway cousin, but none that were spoken of. Like me. Light me a cigarette, will you?”

Andrew fumbles the matches back out of his pocket and dries his hands on the leg of his trousers. The cigarettes have wilted a little in the damp air, and it takes more than one try to get it lit. “Take it quick,” he says, victorious, and holds it out at arm’s length.

“Thanks,” Lanyon says, and turns his head to set his mouth around the end of it. His lips are a cool, smooth shock against Andrew’s scrubbed skin and he barely remembers to open his hand to let Lanyon take the cigarette.

“You’ve got it.” Andrew says stupidly, and sets his hand on the nearest surface. Water rises up against his fingers as Lanyon lets his weight down and pulls at his cigarette.

“I’m sorry,” he says, blowing blue smoke out between them. Terribly sorry, that was a tarty thing to do. I wasn’t thinking.”

Andrew hadn’t thought beyond his own humiliating social embarrassment. It isn’t as though he hasn’t lit cigarettes for friends before, and plainly Lanyon couldn’t have taken it in his own wet hands, though he is, of course, holding it now if rather gingerly, and smiling at Andrew. _Oh_ , Andrew thinks. “Weren’t you?”

“I want to plead drunkenness,” Lanyon says, and his eyes are coolly watchful even if he is still smiling. “But I’m afraid I’m a lot more sober than I would prefer. Still, exhaustion is very like. Don’t blush.”

“I’ll make up the bed for you,” Andrew says, and shifts his weight preparatory to standing. “And you ought to eat something before you sleep. I can’t promise much but there’ll be toast, at least.”

Lanyon says, “Oh, hell with it,” and surges up, hands gripping the rim of the tub and torso lifting clear out of the water, and kisses him. It is a perilous, momentary thing, and Lanyon is touching him only where their mouths meet. A brush of a kiss, and then water splashing up over his feet and pyjama trousers as Lanyon sinks back down. His sleeve is soaked to the elbow; his fingers under water, pressed between Lanyon’s side and the cool marble of the tub.

“You’ve ruined your cigarette,” Andrew says tremulously, and clears his throat to get his voice back under control. “Why did you do that?”

“It seems to me the obvious solution to our problem,” Lanyon says, and smiles like he’s ordering a volley of guns fired.

“Don’t talk rot,” Andrew snaps.

“Am I?” Andrew has met Lanyon before, in public in daylight with Laurie hovering anxiously between them: he has always been charming, courteous and distantly interested; a handsome man with experience carved into his face, the picture of a young naval officer. Now he looks dangerous, and beyond that Andrew hasn’t the wits to tell. He smiles like a shark, and beneath Andrew’s hand the pulse in his blood beats erratically. “You must know that you are beautiful.”

“You’re talking pure rot,” Andrew says, and draws his hand up out of the water and onto his own lap. He leans back for good measure, settling solidly on the stool. He is very conscious that his ears are burning.

“Not about that,” Lanyon promises, and says in a different voice, very quietly and half to himself, “A beautiful boy, golden in the light.”

That is actually considerably worse than the kiss, which in itself is the sort of kiss that his aunt or Cynthia used to bestow on him: it is only the intent that makes it different and for all the blatant innuendo he’s not sure Lanyon _has_ intent. “You need to sleep,” he tells Lanyon, aiming for the sort of sternness he’s seen nurses deploy on men drugged for operations or recovering from them.

Lanyon laughs. “Doing it too brown, my dear.”

“Well, what the _hell_ am I supposed to say to that nonsense?”

“For God’s sake don’t return the compliment,” Lanyon says immediately. “Not my style even when I was the right age for it.”

That sounds enough like the Lanyon he had been beginning to get acquainted with that it strikes him as faintly funny. “The _Phaedrus_ isn’t an exact guide to life,” he says, and lights a cigarette for himself. The paper soaks between his fingers, but it lights quite readily.

Lanyon pushes the hair out of his face and says, “On that we agree completely. Usually about the way, though it seems to have helped Laurie rather a lot. I was given it by our old house-master. I suppose he meant well.”

“Didn’t you like it?” Beyond the Greek in school, which ripped away meaning in favour of translation, it had been Andrew’s first encounter with the beautiful old pagan world. In the beginning he had been too concerned with decrypting Laurie’s message in leaving it for him to pay heed to the words, but slowly the language had trapped him, music translating music. He had read it in the ambulance and in his bed in what had used to be Cynthia’s room in Dave’s house, again and again till some of the passages had become as familiar to him as prayer. _Such is the life of the gods_.

“I knew it off by heart,” Lanyon says, so quietly that it seems a vocalisation of Andrew’s own thoughts. “I made it my creed. For a time I thought I could make a go of it, but the flesh was unwilling. As you say, it isn’t a guide for life.” He laughs a little, but when he speaks it is with care. “So I spent some days feeling guilty and miserable, before giving it all up. But you know, they don’t expect it of normal people. I don’t mean the sort of things that go on in parties, though normal people do rather a lot of that as well. But sex is expected, rather, in a marriage. Better to marry than burn. With our lot, though, even people like Plato, who we end up revering so much, and I’ve used him almost as a sort of shield against the world and I expect Laurie has as well, advocates that we acknowledge desire and then sublimate it. Turn it creative through other means, sort of thing, while normal people can just procreate to justify themselves.”

“It _is_ hard,” Andrew says, and blushes horribly. Lanyon won’t want to know the particularities and it’s impossible in any case to even think of telling him.

Lanyon frowns and straightens to sit on his heels, hands clenched on his thighs just below the water. “Listen. I don’t know what you’ve been taught, but if it’s anything like the usual tripe you’re doing frankly better than I’d have thought given how Laurie made you out to be last year. If you’ve any notion of yourself that’s more than most of us did so early.”

Andrew stares at him, and then quickly away. The granite of the floor contrasts interestingly with the worn marble of the tub and counter-top. The tub has enormous claw feet of brass or bronze which have dug into the floor over time: even granite gives.

Lanyon laughs. The sound echoes in the bathroom, glancing off water: a bellow of laughter. “You _are_ young,” he says at last. “Remind me to have you meet Alec, he’ll eat you right up, and you might even benefit from the experience. It’s alright now, my dear.”

Andrew risks a glance. Lanyon grins broadly at him. He is sitting tailor-wise in the tub, water lapping safely at his ribs.

In the silence there is a tapping at the door, and then Laurie eases it open. “Andrew, what on earth are you doing... _Ralph_?”

Andrew, still looking at Lanyon, expects to see a broader smile. But Lanyon’s face has gone still and drawn, every line etched deep. He looks like a man dying of thirst staring at water. Then he is up and out of the tub and across the bathroom and Laurie is in his arms.

Laurie staggers, and gropes for the door to hold himself up. Lanyon pulls him closer, hands in his hair and at his hip, steadying him easily, and kisses him. Laurie makes an inarticulate sound and grabs at Lanyon, hands slipping on his skin, and melts against him, looping both arms around his shoulders and letting Lanyon take his full weight. They cling together for a minute, then another, muttering to each other and stealing kisses.

Presently Lanyon pulls away a little, kisses Laurie’s forehead in a valedictory fashion, and says, “Hullo, Spuddy. I’ve got you all wet, I’m sorry.”

Laurie says, sounding scattered to the winds, “Why didn’t you wake me? Andrew, you should have called me.”

Andrew stares at him. “Ought I? I’m sorry, I didn’t think.”

Laurie looks around the bathroom and more carefully at Andrew. “Come along, we all need a change of clothes.”

“I’ve mine right here,” Lanyon says, and cordially shepherds them both out the door.

 

* * *

 

Outside, Laurie leans heavily against the door, his eyes twisted shut. “Has he been keeping you up long?”

Andrew shrugs. “Some time. I hadn’t really noticed.” He feels as though he might just as well have stayed in his dorms. The moment Laurie came through the door he ceased to exist for either of them. “I’ll make up the bed for him.”

Laurie nods and levers himself away from the door. “Andrew, my dear. I’m sorry. Was it very tiresome?”

The door to the linen closet is stuck, which offers a moment’s necessary respite. “No,” he informs the sheets, entirely truthfully. “He was exhausted and asked me to make sure he didn’t fall asleep and slip in. That’s all.”

“Did he,” Laurie says in a tight voice, and Andrew catches him surveying the wet clothes with new suspicion.

“No. It’s fine. Here, take this. I’ll get it damp quicker than you will.”

They make the bed rapidly and silently, Andrew doing most of the work. Ten to one Laurie’s jolted the knee and doesn’t want to admit it.

Laurie stops with a pillow stuffed half into its case, and says, “I didn’t know Ralph would come up. I’d never subject you to this sort of thing.” It is a stiff, awkward bit of apology, and Laurie’s shoulders are tight with embarrassment.

It only means that Laurie would much rather have Lanyon here than him. “His ship came in for a refitting,” Andrew volunteers.

“Yes,” Laurie mutters, stuffing the pillow in the rest of the way. “I wrote him nearly a month ago telling him I’d come down here this week; didn’t imagine he’d even get the letter for another week or two.”

“I could take the train back in the morning,” Andrew offers.

Laurie frowns over that, but doesn’t immediately dismiss the idea, which is as good an answer as he was expecting. At length he says, “Andrew, don’t be absurd.”

Laurie in this sort of mood has to be let alone to think things through. It was one of the first things Andrew had noticed about him: he behaves as though thought is its own activity and cannot be crammed in with other things. The bed is made, so there’s nothing else to occupy them, at any rate. His sleeves are still damp, and at his calves the pyjamas are clinging to the skin. Andrew takes a fold of fabric between his fingers and squeezes a drop of water out of it. If he sat down on the bed he’d leave an impression on the sheets. The leather of the chair Laurie’s sat in will warp if not wiped down.

Presently Laurie says, “Go to bed, I’ll finish here.” There isn’t anything to finish, but Andrew takes it for the dismissal it is. He’s at the door when Laurie says, “If it’s too awkward for you, I’ll understand, of course. But don’t leave on my account.”

He comes back to the bed and rescues the pillow from Laurie’s convulsive grasp. “You’re dripping, come get changed out of your wet things.”

Laurie takes his hand and kisses the wrist, pulling him close. “I love you,” he says, and his voice is clear and steady.

“I know,” Andrew tells him, and bends to kiss Laurie before either of them can say anything more. If he closes his eyes and pretends he can almost believe that they are two together, and only their quick breath colours the air.

There are footsteps, and a quiet knock on the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People, there is now really stunning art of this fic. Go look upon it and squee. http://fbrri.tumblr.com/post/128226749214/februeruri-lanyon-says-oh-hell-with-it


	2. Chapter 2

Ralph wakes in a room edged with hard light. Someone has come in while he was asleep to fix the blackouts, and has tugged the covers up over him. His satchel has been set against the wall closest the bed. He pulls a shirt from it: mufti and crumpled a little about the collar, but he is on vacation, he reminds himself sternly, and has been in worse condition shipboard just recently. It is four by his watch and the place is quiet.

The house is bigger than he had thought it at night, a misdirecting effect created almost entirely by the vast amounts of furniture squeezed into the generous space. A sofa of monstrous proportions with an afghan thrown over the back abuts the table he’d lighted upon hours ago, and Laurie is sitting on it with no care for his leg, hidden behind the day’s newspaper. A local affair no doubt largely concerned with interests and people Laurie knows next to nothing about, but he’s giving it as much attention as a private message come straight from Churchill. It is absurdly endearing.

Ralph sets a hand on his head, carding through his hair, and says, “Hullo, Spuddy.”

Laurie stiffens for a second, and then pushes against his hand like a cat asking to be petted. “Hullo Ralph. Sleep well?”

“Better than I’d hoped. Did you try to wake me?”

“Mrs. Evans did when she came in but you can’t have been asleep for more than a couple of hours then.”

Ralph skirts the sofa and perches on the ottoman set in the corner beside it, lifting Laurie’s feet onto his lap. “Did I scandalise her?”

“She’s a married woman with three sons.” The paper drops finally, and Ralph neatly stamps on his need to fold it away. Probably Laurie intends to take it up again in some time.

“You’d be surprised how easily those are scandalised,” he says instead, palming the arches of Laurie’s feet, and thumbs the jut of his ankles. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

Laurie’s university stories are revealingly different from Raynes’, and not only in matters of enthusiasm, which Ralph would have expected in any case. In the beginning he is inclined to set it down to Laurie’s interests in Oxford having been spent years ago and changed into a slog of getting things over with, but a quarter hour of carefully, loyally suppressed complaint cannot be put down to mere coincidence.

“You can tell me,” he says finally, and reaches up to clasp Laurie’s knee in a gentle hold, thumb and forefinger closing around his patella. “I won’t turn it to my own account.”

“I know,” Laurie sighs, and relaxes in his hold. “Ralph, I’m sorry. We’ve been over all this in theory; I don’t know why he’s balking now.”                                                                                                                                                    

Lord, how like Laurie. “My dear, let me have a run at it. It won’t be the first petulant boyfriend I’ve had to deal with.”

“It isn’t like Sandy,” Laurie murmurs, and leans a hand down to smooth over his brow. “I hate to put you to the trouble.”

“I didn’t mean Sandy,” Ralph says. “Alec’s always been prone to claustrophobia. Spud, you didn’t think I’d suggest an untested system to you?”

“No,” Laurie says thoughtfully, and draws his legs from Ralph’s grasp. “Of course not. Come to the kitchen, I’ll scrounge up something for you. Mrs. Evans was raving all morning over my wonderful naval friend and his considerations towards us rationed, deprived sufferers.”

“I’ve something in my kit I must remember to give you. It isn’t much, but you won’t get the like very easily for a while. We were stuck for two days in... well, never mind that. If you don’t like it, pass it on to your mother with my compliments.” He’d bought the cloth thinking of Laurie, but they’re close enough in colouring that it should suit her. It’s the colour of the skies over Mombasa Port, and it had felt such a novelty to have someone for whom he could in all ease buy presents.

“That’ll do Straike,” Laurie grins. “Let me up.”

In the kitchen there is a covered plate with a slice of fruit cake on it, next the dish of butter and a cup overturned in its saucer. Laurie checks at the sight and sits down in the nearest chair, laughing weakly. Further investigation turns up a plate of toast left to warm in the oven, the kettle filled and set to boil on its hob, and a single precious perfect egg boiled in its shell.

“I wish my matelots sulked the way your boy does,” Ralph says, and sets to with a will. He had been too tired, last night, to feel his own hungers, but sleep accomplishes miracles. The afternoon has something about it of wishes fulfilled, Laurie puttering around the kitchen and talking to him quietly, and the next three days stretching out ahead of them.

Laurie sets a cup of tea in front of him and informs him that they’re nearly out of sugar. “But you’re not in favour of sweet tea anyway,” he finishes and sits across from Ralph, grinning and reaching for his hand.

It would be a clear enough invitation without Laurie flushing from the tips of his ears down into the open collar of his shirt. Ralph wants to take him to bed and see how far the blush extends. But there’s the boy somewhere about the house, who had been so much more than gracious last night despite Ralph’s constant perverse attempts to wrong-foot him, and who is generous in his sulks, and for whom none of this can be very easy.

“It’s an American affectation,” he says, pulling his hand from Laurie’s and downing the bitter tea. “Where’s Raynes gone?”

Raynes has gone upstairs, a brutish little move that does nothing to impede Laurie access and firmly announces that he wants, if not to be left alone, then to be chased. Ralph runs him to ground in Edward Lethbridge’s library, deep into Gibbon’s _Rise and Fall_ , and has to suppress a superstitious twinge. It is hard to know what one looks like at any time, but Hal Fitzroy had had a photograph of himself and Ralph, taken in Perwick, Easter hols of the year Hal finished at Cambridge and Ralph should have gone up: Hal had been frowning in an approximation of sober adulthood, but Dickie Fitzroy had taken the photo at a moment when Ralph was smiling at the camera. Raynes’ hair is longer, and falls differently from his brow.

“You’re up,” Raynes says, in the way he seems to have of keeping up a running commentary of obvious things.

“I am,” Ralph allows, already turning to leave the room. “Come along, there’s a girl I want you to meet.”

 

* * *

 

Fifteen minutes later and smugly reassured of the efficacy of speed in altering the mood of young men for the noticeably better, Ralph says, “Here’s a likely spot.” They’re not quite at the edge of town, but this part has older buildings set deep in their own gardens behind high walls, quite often in ruins.

Raynes, who has clung on quite creditably through the ride, disembarks and takes a few quick steps like he’s trying to regain equilibrium. “Likely for what?”

“You can have a go at thrashing me,” Ralph says, switching off the ignition and easing off the bike, leaning her up against the tree. “I’m told you’re a notable pugilist.”

Raynes blinks owlishly, opens his mouth, closes it, and colours deeply.

“You decked a man a year ago for pretending to be me,” Ralph reminds him gently. “A good solid hit, his eye was still purple when I saw him a couple days later.”

“I wouldn’t do it now. I oughtn’t have done it then. You must think I’m a rotten pacifist, to hit out the moment I’m angry.”

Everything in him that is kind to Laurie is cruel to Raynes. It is abysmal. “Unfair to Raynes,” he admits, and the boy looks at him nakedly. Nobody should be allowed to be so young, to wear one’s heart so blatantly on the sleeve. “I bettered your work. I broke his ribs. I put him in the hospital.”

“For saying those things about you and Laurie?”

“For wearing my name while he said them. There’s a pack of fags in my kit, fetch them for me.” He sits down heavily on the wall, strings cut. Some days, this boy... but it must be borne.

Raynes tosses him the cigarettes and clambers over to sit beside him, knocking shoulders companionably. Ralph reaches out and runs a hand through his hair and hands him a lit cigarette. The smoke streams blue from his fingers into the open air.

“He made me feel it was filthy,” Raynes says presently. “I’m not daft, I knew that I loved Laurie better than men love their friends. I didn’t know the name for it, and he made it a part of all the beastliness that happens in schools. I wanted him gone and I didn’t have the words to make him.”

“It _is_ a part of it,” Ralph says, and tries and fails to make his voice less harsh. “I wanted Laurie when he was fifteen and I was eighteen; I kissed him when he was sixteen and I was being given the sack for molesting younger boys. Laurie’s friends when he was in Oxford first used to come down to the docks to rent sailors. All of it goes together, you can’t set a part of it aside and call it pure and sanctified. That’s a coward’s trick, to set aside what is vile in your own desires and allot it to others, give it a name: neurotic, pervert, _homosexual_. What you want to kill is in yourself. The projection-trick doesn’t serve. In the end you turn on yourself.”

Raynes takes it in, smoking industriously. In the afternoon light he looks heightened somehow, every strand of hair lit up, the faint dusting on lip and forearm turning the skin a battered bronze. “ _Did_ you do it?”

“Not my style.”

Raynes stubs his cigarette out in a long black smear on the stones and pockets the stub. “I’m glad,” he says, and smiles like he means it. “There was a boy at my school when I was very junior, who used to force the younger boys. I wouldn’t like to think that Laurie had fallen in love with someone of that sort.”

He wants to ask whether Raynes was coerced, but all knowing will do is leave him helplessly angry. Instead he says, feeling his way, “Must have been a bad shock for you to see me last night.”

Raynes grins. “I don’t shock easy.”

He doesn’t. He doesn’t do any of the things Ralph would have thought likely from the boy Laurie talks about. “Smoke another. Light me one.”

A bus passes while they smoke, slowing at the sight of them before Ralph waves at his bike by way of explanation. A boy of about thirteen has his head stuck out of the window, dark hair wind-tousled. To him they must look like brothers. Ralph has aged fast in the sun and open air, but he still looks enough like he did at nineteen for the thought to occur. It cannot be unthought, but sits heavily at the base of his skull, pressing against the bone.

Raynes says, “Do you wonder who used to live here?” The wall they’re perched on breaks for the rusted hinges of an old gate some yards on, in the distance the remnants of a chimney rear from the undergrowth. The garden has run wild, but there are probably still fruit trees in among the weeds.

“Probably a clerk attached to the Abbey,” he improvises rapidly. “Look, you can still see the... cornices, and the fretwork on the gates is peculiar to the churches in the area.”

Raynes leans forward precariously to peer at the gateway. “Really?”

“Hell, I don’t know. You’re the historian. Closest I’ve ever come is sleeping with an archaeologist.” Raynes is glaring at him with the amusing ferocity of a deceived child. “I’m sorry. But how the hell did you expect me to know? I’m rather rot at making stories up out of whole cloth.”

“And you a sailor,” Raynes accuses, his voice at the edge of laughter.

Hell, he likes the boy. It’s not like he’s getting much of Laurie this time round one way or another. “Look, if I leave now I can find a hotel for the night and be back at the _Bluebell_ tomorrow. It’ll cement my reputation as the sad bastard who’s only got eyes for his ship. Shall I?”

“What for?”

“Ah,” Ralph says, leaning back on one arm, wrist taut under the pressure, and smiling. “Laurie didn’t say you were the sort of Christian who enjoys being tortured.”

“Can’t abide it,” the boy says, still staring out at the path they’ve come up by. “Used to bawl like a child when I got thrashed. But you’re not torture. Laurie’s glad to have you here, and so am I, if you’ll promise not to do anything idiotish like last night.”

“I promise.” It’s all very absurdly sincere, but—and Ralph feels this keenly—none of it’s a joke. He is struck, and not for the first time, by the faint unreality that clings to their conversations, and irked by Laurie’s predictable consistency in taste. “Thank you, my dear.”

“You needn’t live down to that man’s impersonation of you.”

A hit. A palpable hit. “You’re not much like Laurie tells me,” Ralph mutters, only half intending a joke. “Not _all_ of the air.”

“Did you bring me here to see whether I matched up to Laurie’s stories?” He’s blotchily red, and only now beginning to be angry.

“Oh, no. The boy in them would have balked long before it came to crisis. _You_ were quite good till last night.”

“You think I’m sulking because you’re here.” Raynes laughs, a little wild, and says, “Didn’t you talk to Laurie at all?”

“He told me where to find you, but your affection for motorcycles skipped him by.”

“He doesn’t know. I don’t get much chance to indulge,” Raynes says offhandedly. “I don’t want you gone. You’ve brought the most excellent fruit.”

“Every bit worth the price of admission?” It’s a weak joke, but really now. Fruit?

“You haven’t been living under rationing,” Raynes explains. “We’re sheltered a little in Oxford, but while I was in London it was terrible, and you can only get fruit on the black-market at quite exorbitant prices.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t bring any more. It wasn’t quite at a moment’s notice, but it was close.”

“Were you hit?”

Ralph thinks of the long limp back home, clinging close to the coast and every man alive praying to avoid German submarines. Raynes is smiling at him a little unsurely, and in the moment his is the face, not of the enemy but of the shirker staying safe at home. Then it fades and he is simply a stranger vaguely concerned about an acquaintance’s ill-health.“I can’t tell you,” Ralph says. “You ought to know the rules; it isn’t as though they don’t plaster the posters over every third wall. But perhaps you turn your eyes from them the same as the war.”

Raynes turns his head as if he’s been hit. “I wondered when it would come to that,” he says tonelessly.

“Why do you do it? You’ve done ambulance work in London, it’s hardly worse than that.” Which is a lie entirely, but they have bombs in common, and a greater hell than London in the Blitz might be difficult for Raynes to imagine.

“It isn’t about personal courage,” Raynes says. His head is up now, and he is speaking very patiently, in the sort of voice Ralph had used a lifetime ago to explain school rules to errant new boys and most commonly now uses upon his crew.

“It’s a matter of _principles_ , to refuse to fight when a madman is acting in violation of all human decencies?”

“ _That_ isn’t about personal courage either,” Raynes tells him, still very gently. “I don’t pretend to be a good example of the Friends, but I would be a very bad one if I abandoned my principles when it became difficult to stand by them.”

A stranger one is shackled to is unanswerable in many ways. Ralph carefully laces his hands around his knees; the last thing they need is a brawl, and he is himself perilously close to starting one. News from France has started filtering through, even to the civilians, of the grotesquery of the labour camps. It is impossible to know what is happening in the rest of Europe.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” Raynes says stiffly. “But I must act in accordance with my own beliefs.”

“I don’t.” He tries forcing his face into a smile and rapidly reconsiders it. His left hand is a point of pain against his knees. He unclasps his hands and considers the view. A broken wall, an overrun garden, a ruinous house. “Did you go exploring as a child?”

Raynes startles but takes it up gamely. “It wouldn’t have been easy on my grandmother if I disappeared for hours and she couldn’t find me. And my aunt didn’t like any of us to go very far. Did you?”

“Rather a lot when I was at home and even more at school. I think at some point I entertained thoughts of running away to join a circus. I must have been all of five.”

“Are we going to pretend that you weren’t on the verge of decking me?”

“Eventually of course I just ran off to sea, thus fulfilling all my mother’s most dire prophecies about moral dissolution”, Ralph finishes coolly. “Sit down, damn you.”

Raynes stares mutinously, and sits abruptly back down on the wall, teetering a little from the abruptness of the impact. He spends himself carelessly. “I don’t like being lied to.”

“I don’t much enjoy spending my precious leave reasoning with a scrubby schoolboy. Nobody’s lying to you. You’re sulking because something you’d accepted in theory is proving too difficult for you to take when it’s turned real. Don’t, for God’s sake, make this into a matter of principles as well.”

“Laurie can be short-sighted sometimes,” Raynes says, voice taut. “It might be incredible to you and him that I can have concerns beyond our arrangements, or that they might cause trouble, but your lack of belief doesn’t affect its existence.”

In its way it is as curiously stiff a statement as he’d have imagined from Raynes in the early days when Laurie was effusively describing a wooden little boy, but the hurt underneath is promising. “Doing it too brown. Which is it, friends Laurie doesn’t like, or friends who don’t like Laurie?”

Raynes smiles a little smile. “Am I that transparent?”

“Clear as ground-glass. Come along, then.” _Tell Auntie the trouble_ , Bim would have said, which would at least have got them past this curious stiffness, but Ralph can’t yet commit such ridiculousness around Raynes. “You might as well spit it out. I’ll get it from Laurie if I have to, but you can make thing easier for both of us.”

Raynes tells the story in dribs and drabs, horribly reluctant to tell tales and horribly relieved, once Ralph gets him past the initial hurdles, to have someone to tell it to. It doesn’t amount to much, and telling it isn’t—to Ralph’s mind—anywhere in the same weight-class as the sort of betrayal Raynes is clearly afraid he’s committing. Certainly he’s heard worse, but Laurie _will_ take on peculiarly; Raynes isn’t wrong in diagnosing myopia.

“You must think I’m an awful scrub,” he finishes wretchedly, and Ralph is hard put not to laugh.

“Terrible,” he agrees. “Absolute horror of a boy. How dare you help the people we’re fighting to save? My dear, I’ve never been party to bringing these children over, but I’ve heard from people who have. They’re an absolute mess of nerves, and very often they’re orphaned by the journey if they weren’t already. You’re doing excellent work.”

“I’m not doing anything much. It’s only luck my French is good enough I can carry on a conversation.”

Talking in its own language to a panicked, miserable child isn’t quite nothing, but Raynes must know that, and Ralph isn’t here to massage anyone’s ego. Instead he says, quite mildly, “I never went much beyond the hullos, and what got beaten into me in school has since been knocked out. I’ve passable Danish, and rather good Arabic but I don’t think that’s any use to you.”

“I’ll refer the next Mohameddan we get to your care, though you might have to wait a while: they’re rather thin on the ground,” Raynes promises. “Am I making heavy weather of nothing?”

“Not quite nothing. But he’s only jealous of your time, my dear.” Oh, how Alec would laugh and laugh and _laugh_. The absurdity of this conversation, really, it tries credulity.

“I know,” Raynes says, and stops, biting his lip in indecision. “But it feels as though he’s trying to fix something that’s part of me, because it doesn’t fit how he thinks of me, and he’s going about it till a gardener lopping off an unruly branch every time it grows back.”

“Is he pruning you in shapes you dislike?”

“I don’t know,” Raynes says, face open and earnest. Ralph doesn’t think he’s ever been _that_ young. “The hedgerow doesn’t get an opinion on the gardener’s work. That’s the owner’s province.”

“Do you think,” Ralph says, voice gone helplessly soft and cruel, “that I’ve the mastery of him, or a hand in directing your... pruning?”

“No. If you did I’d have been uprooted cleanly ages go.”

Ralph laughs. “You’re not wrong,” he manages presently. “You’re not entirely right, but you’re not wrong. But I don’t hate you, and I haven’t a say in any of this. If you told me because you thought otherwise, I’m sorry.”

“No!” The one word is spoken quietly, but is blurted nonetheless, from what Ralph imagines is at least a little offended pride. More words stumble out following the first, halting and unsure, like there’s a price for each. “I didn’t mean to sound...like a tattletale. And if you are waiting around to hand me a hanky and ask me to grow up, well, we’re wasting our time. I just... I’m sorry. It felt good to talk, I suppose. You nearly felt like a safe stranger, which you are not. Of course. No wonder you... I apologise. I shouldn’t bungle things so.”

Ralph grants him some credit to handle rage and disappointment and leash it down. Someone else might not have noticed the shadow cross his face.

“Sit. No. _Sit._ Good lad. Now. Father Confessor and confidante are strange roles for me, stranger for someone who hasn’t tried me as a friend.” And already has me as his lover’s older lover, he thinks. How we muddle on! “But I’ll try to live up to it. Cigarette?”

The last question comes lower and gentler in a way Raynes hadn’t really anticipated. And Ralph can see where that _,_ of all things tips him off the scale. He lights two cigarettes out of habit and passes one to him, in what he hopes, is still some dredges of companionable silence.

Raynes takes a few drags and starts talking quietly about some of the cases he has had to handle already and some of the people he has been working with, grossly understating what seems to Ralph fairly remarkable success. He talks about doing the regular and going on to work in a school or orphanage; there are already talks, he says with quiet joy, where his name is being raised as a possibility. The boy may not realise it, but he has the gift of storytelling. Neither drab events, nor striated acts of Christian charity intrude and what comes out most vividly are the people, each rendered in a few sentences: the child with the gift of gab; the elderly Quaker gentleman who tries not to turn anyone away but has to end up doing so; the young bloods of the clubs Raynes has joined who, rather like Raynes himself if Ralph has his guess, hold the ragtag party together.

Ralph takes it as the crumb of gratitude that it is, and starts matching him with stories of the seamen on trailers, those who hate halibut gruel, and those who get shell-shocked and how sometimes tea really works better than navy rum, who’d have thought? They live their lives among similar people, children and undergraduates and seamen.

Presently Raynes says, “Oughtn’t we go back?”

The sun is looking its last in the sky, a bright burnished gold untouched by clouds. Rare at any time and rarer now, with autumn chill creeping into the bones. Ralph wants to topple off the wall and lie full length in the crisp grass and send plumes of cigarette smoke up into the brass air. If he asks, very probably Raynes will stay, and they can talk, really talk now that they have finished feinting at each other. Beyond the broken gate the house looms drearily, the brickwork looking rather like something out of a child’s fairy stories: there must be rooms in it with at least half a roof and three walls standing. If it rains they can take shelter there. He’s slept rougher, and this would gratify the scrubby schoolboy he’d been so long ago, who used to be found out at times like this and dragged forcibly home at dusk.

He says, “Before the last of the light goes, really. I’d rather not ride rough over someone’s hay-field.”

“It isn’t exactly darkest Africa,” Raynes says, just a little reproachfully, and gets up willingly enough, and leans a hand down to tug Ralph to his feet.

Raynes has a wiry strength to him that leaves Ralph a touch off balance: he had been expecting the hand to be an empty gesture, but the boy put his back into it. He walks forward a few steps, quickly, towards his motorcycle, and runs his hands over the chassis to ground himself. It’s a paltry bit of machinery compared to the _Bluebell_ , but she’ll do till he can get back to his girl. “Just the wilds of Oxfordshire,” he says presently, and turns the ignition on. The engine starts smoothly, and he walks her forward a little to make it easier for Raynes to climb on behind him. “The man I borrowed her off will take it out of my hide if I get a scratch on her.”

“Terrible thing to do to a girl,” Raynes says, and Ralph stiffens for a moment before he adds, “I thought you owned this motorcycle, though.”

“No,” Ralph says, “nicked it off a friend who’s still at sea. My car’s in a garage in charge of my friend Alec. Now keep quiet a moment, this bit’s tricky.”

Raynes stays silent the whole ride home, head lowered and forehead braced against Ralph’s shoulder, body neatly tucked in behind his and imitating its lines. The turns are easier with a passenger balancing out the weight.

Edward Lethbridge’s house, seen in the last remnants of daylight, at leisure, gives off none of the eccentricity its overstuffed interior conveys. It’s the sort of thing that gets described in magazines as a perfect specimen of the type, a small, two-storey building set away from the road in a fringe of garden, roses rambling over the front of the house, a willow arching gracefully near the gate. It looks like a trap to Ralph, reeking in story-book domesticity: gruff old men and kindly mothers and boys with dogs romping around.

“I didn’t think the road was funny,” Raynes ventures.

“No. No,” Ralph manages, still laughing weakly, “it’s not particularly funny. You’ve got to let an old man have his weaknesses. Shell shock, you know. Here, get off, will you, I’ll wheel her to the back of the house. No, don’t give me your helmet, you might as well take mine, just put them on the mantle in my room.”

Ralph’s rounding the house when Laurie opens the front door and steps through, leaning heavily on his cane, clearly summoned by the sound of the engine. Raynes goes up to him, and takes his hands, speaking low and rapidly.

Laurie favours him with a beatific smile and lets Raynes take his weight.


End file.
